Pres. Donald Trump: Thank you very much. To every family across our nation, the first lady and I want to wish you all a very, very Merry Christmas. For Christians, this is a joyous time to remember God's greatest Gift to the world. More than 2,000 years ago the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. He said, "Do not be afraid. You have found favor with God." The angel told her that she would give birth to a baby boy, Jesus, who would be called the Son of the Most High. Nine months later, Christ was born in the town of Bethlehem. The Son of God came into the world in a humble stable.
As Christians everywhere know, the birth of our Lord and Savior changed history forever. At Christmas, we give thanks to God, and that God sent His only son to die for us and to offer everlasting peace to all humanity. More than two millennia after the birth of Jesus Christ, His teachings continue to inspire and uplift billions and billions of people all over the globe. His divine words still fill our hearts with hope and faith, and Christians everywhere still strive to live by Jesus' timeless commandment to his disciples: "Love one another." Above all, during this sacred season, our souls are full of thanks and praise for Almighty God for sending us Christ, His Son, to redeem the world. Tonight, we ask that God will continue to bless this nation and we pray that he will grant every American family a Christmas season full of joy, hope, and peace.
On behalf of Melania and the entire Trump family, Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for a very, very great and happy new year. Thank you.
(Singing)
Roger Marsh: This is Roger Marsh, and you've been listening to an uplifting Christmas message from President Donald Trump. His words serve as a great reminder of the true reason for this season. With that, right now we are going to continue our 2020 best-of-broadcast retrospective. Today we're highlighting the first part of Dr. Dobson's interview with author and researcher Shaunti Feldhahn. Hope you enjoy it.
Dr. Dobson: Well, welcome everyone to Family Talk, which is a listener supported ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Dr. James Dobson and I appreciate your being with us today for what I think is going to be a very enlightening conversation. Now, I want to start with this. I'm going to ask you a question. What subject do you think Jesus talked about more than any other topic in His ministry? Was it heaven, or hell, or the commandments, or the teachings of the prophets? No. Surprisingly if you don't already know this, it was money. Nearly everything He said about it was negative, or it came in the form of a warning.
Jesus was not condemning wealth. It's not having wealth, but it's how you use it. He was telling his followers that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, and that you cannot serve God and mammon, which is another word for money.
He also knew and was warning us that we would face many temptations and conflicts in this area. And it is a minefield for husbands and wives, and that's what we're going to talk about today. What better person to help us deal with this subject than Shaunti Feldhahn, who has been my guest so many times before. Shaunti, I appreciate your flying all the way here from Atlanta to be with us. It's good to have you and have a chance to talk about your new book.
Shaunti Feldhahn: It's fantastic to be here, Doctor, thank you.
Dr. Dobson: Shaunti is a widely respected social researcher and a bestselling author with over 3 million books sold. That's a lot. Shaunti is a graduate of Harvard University and she has worked on Capitol Hill and Wall Street. She and I have worked together. We were just talking about it. I think it's been nearly 20-
Shaunti Feldhahn: It's 20-something years.
Dr. Dobson: 20 years since you were first here.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah, crazy.
Dr. Dobson: Well, you're back because you always have something good to say and I like the way you say it. Now you have a new book. First of all, I want to mention the ones that we've talked about in the past, For Men Only and For Women Only. Those books went through the roof. I think both- were both of them-
Shaunti Feldhahn: In part because of you. In part because of you, yes.
Dr. Dobson: Were both of them number one?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah, they were.
Dr. Dobson: Yeah. Well, they were number one for us too. Well, you've got a new book, you and Jeff together, your husband, and it's called Thriving in Love and Money: Five Game-Changing Insights About Your Relationship, Your Money, and Yourself. You went right for the heart of it, didn't you? Talk about Jesus and His message.
Shaunti Feldhahn: We did. Well, it was interesting, because we felt like God was telling us that this was supposed to be our next research project, because you know, all of these books are based on these big research projects that we do.
Dr. Dobson: That's why you always come here with something new to say.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah. We basically try to use that analytical background that God gave us, to dig into things that matter more than Wall Street. You know, the relationship stuff.
Dr. Dobson: Yeah. You interviewed 3,000 people for this book?
Shaunti Feldhahn: We did. Interviews and nationally representative surveys, and then drew on the fact that over the last 15 years, we've included about 20,000 people in those surveys and interviews and focus groups. This book was based on all of that. But yeah, the special purpose surveys of about 3,000 people.
Dr. Dobson: These are intimate subjects when you talk about husbands and wives and their relationship. Did you find people were willing to open up and tell you the truth about the conflicts that they've had?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes. The open sesame, because ... I'll tell you what the open sesame is, because I would often interview random strangers. I mean, that's one of the things I try to do is whoever picks me up at the airport in the Uber, I'm talking to him all the way until he drops me off. The open sesame for me is always, okay, for Jeff and I, this was the one big area left where we were not on the same page. They're like, "Oh my gosh, it's not just me." That's one of the things that we found is people need the encouragement to recognize, no, it's not just you. Most couples don't feel like they have it all together in their relationship in this area.
Dr. Dobson: I think I read that 92% of the people that you interviewed have had trouble over money.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah, tension around money in some way. A lot of them are like Jeff and I had been for so many years of our marriage where it's not necessarily knockdown, drag out fighting. Like for us, we didn't fight. We just didn't talk about it. We just avoided the topic. That's the case for a lot-
Dr. Dobson: Did you fuss about it?
Shaunti Feldhahn: We-
Dr. Dobson: Was it a source of irritation?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes, it was a source of irritation, because every time we tried to talk about it, one or both of us would get defensive and go, "Okay, fine," and just back away.
Dr. Dobson: Well, spell that out for us, if you don't mind.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Sure.
Dr. Dobson: What was the source of the conflict?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Well, that's what we spent the three years of this research figuring out, because-
Dr. Dobson: You're not the only one.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Well, what we found actually, as we did this research project, was that we found whether it's me and Jeff or anybody out there who's listening to this, is that when you're having tension around money, it turns out it's not about the money. It's about how money makes you feel and how it makes your spouse feel. It's about all these like expectations running under the surface of how money should work, and these beliefs that you bring from your childhood, and these insecurities, and worries, and things that you don't even know are there.
All of that stuff is running underneath the surface in us, and we don't know that that's even there. We don't know how to talk about it, and so we try to go straight to what we feel we should be able to do, which is we need to have a budget. We need to have a financial plan. We need to get out of debt.
All of that's great, but we sort of realized along the way, that's kind of step three. Like step one and two are understanding all that stuff under the surface so then you can talk about it. If you can talk about money without defensiveness, then you can do the budgeting and whatnot. But there are so many people who carry around shame that they don't have a good budget or they're not handling things well, when they're trying to go straight to that step three.
We found, now it's not a tiny number, but here's what we found in the research. About 20% of people can just talk about money just fine. You know, it doesn't cause defensiveness, or awkwardness, or frustration. They've probably got a working budget. They have regular budget meetings, and it all just works. That happens, and that's great.
But first of all, the rest of us are jealous of you and we kind of think you're mutants. Like how do you do this? That's really what we were trying to dig out. Why is it an issue for the roughly 80% that that's not their story?
Dr. Dobson: Well, what is their story? What is it that they are agitated about?
Shaunti Feldhahn: It turns out … and again, this was a long process and this is a little bit over-simplifying things. But everything pulls down into one of five big categories of the reasons why, and those five reasons that are running under the surface are the things that aren't about the dollars and cents, but are about whatever the expectations are under the surface.
Dr. Dobson: Yes.
Shaunti Feldhahn: One of the five is that it turns out that often we're just not valuing what the other person is valuing. Like for some reason, we know we're a different human being than our spouse, but for some reason we haven't translated that into thinking, "Huh, they may care about something different than I care about or something different matters to them." We just care about different things when it comes to spending or saving or whatever, and we don't realize that we're holding the subconscious idea that we're kind of right and the other person just must be wrong.
We found that two-thirds of the people in the survey ... This cracked me up when I got the numbers back. Two-thirds of the people in the survey said, "If my spouse would just think about it correctly, I'm sure they would agree with me." That's the first big hurdle.
Dr. Dobson: So it's a spending issue.
Shaunti Feldhahn: It could be a spending issue or it could be a host of things. I'll give you an example, okay? The classic values gap is the difference between this person who's maybe more of the saver and the person who's more of the spender. Even when you have two savers in a marriage, which may be you and Shirley, even when you have two people who are more oriented kind of that way, usually one of them is more willing to spend money than the other, so you often have this kind of friction. This is an era that we're living in right now when all the savers out there are feeling very vindicated, because of-
Dr. Dobson: What's going on.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah. The economic uncertainty that's happening, at least now while we're recording this, all the savers are going, "See, this is the time you're supposed to be saving for." Jeff actually came to me at the beginning when the pandemic first happened and the shutdown first happened. All of our speaking engagements were canceled, right? A huge chunk of our revenue just went away. He came to me a few days later, and he's more the saver. I'm more the spender. I'm not crazy, but I'm more willing to be flexible with money. He said, "You know, I have to tell you, I'm dealing with a little bit of resentment." He said, "I just have to confess this, because if we hadn't gone out to eat so many times last year, or if we hadn't gone to Disney World with the kids, we'd have thousands more dollars in our bank account right now that we could really use."
It was interesting though. A few days later, he came back. Because that's a classic values difference, right? I would love to go out to eat. I wanted to go to Disney World. He wanted to save the money. Then he came back a few days later and he said, "You know what I just realized though?" He said, "When we were going out to eat last year and we went to Disney World, you were trying to build experiences with the family. You were building memories. You were building togetherness and closeness. Now we're stuck on top of each other in quarantine and we like each other. Like we enjoy being together."
Finally, he went, "Huh. That was, in your mind, not just throwing money away. That was investment in something." I said, "Yes." It was interesting. His willingness to come to me and say, "I see what you valued," even if he maybe still disagreed, he says, "Now, we could have gone to picnics in the park for free." But even if he still might have handled things differently, his willingness to see what I cared about, it lowered all of my defenses and it made me so much more willing to care about what he cared about.
Dr. Dobson: You know, that really makes sense. My dad explained it this way. He said it's a difference between my mother and him in regard to what was valuable. He said, "I could spend money on shotgun shells and go hunting, and I could fire them all, and come home with an empty box and maybe no quail, and feel like I had spent the money well, because that was something I cared about." My mother could go shopping and buy a potato peeler that didn't work and she thought that was a waste. It was just a difference in what matters.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Perfect example. Yeah. Well, and if you think about it, most couples, again, this was somewhere in that 80/20 split, most couples have some of these gaps where they're just on two different pages. One of the things Jeff sort of put it into words, and this is the case with a lot of people, is he finally realized after we were doing this research, he said, "Shaunti, I'm so sorry. I realize that what I was thinking all those years was that You just had a character flaw. If you would just see things my way, but you poor thing, you're not seeing it correctly."
One of the big a-ha moments for a lot of people, if they want to have a good relationship with their spouse around money, is to recognize that this other way that their spouse might want to handle something, it might be totally legitimate. It's just different. This is-
Dr. Dobson: Well, now, you've got to admit though that there are couples where they do have a character flaw.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes.
Dr. Dobson: There are some people that are just wasteful with money, and the other one realizes it and tries to put on the brakes and has great trouble doing it.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Oh, yeah. We interviewed plenty of those people. I felt so bad. We spent a lot of time interviewing, doing this one in depth interview with this poor man whose wife truly had a shopping addiction, and it was bad. What we say right at the beginning of the book is that we're dealing with the vast majority of cases where you have goodwill towards each other. There's no big addictions. It's truly that you have two good willed people who may just view life differently.
Dr. Dobson: Well, there were five of these sources of conflict.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yep.
Dr. Dobson: Restate the first.
Shaunti Feldhahn: The first one is that we just tend not to value what the other person values and we don't realize that we're doing it.
Dr. Dobson: Okay. What's number two?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Number two is that we tend to have very different gut level fears that are running under the surface. It's interesting. There are not that many ... There are a few things in this research that we found that were gender related. This happened to be one of them. There weren't that many of them, but this was one where it turns out that men and women actually tend underneath the surface to have two different sets of primary fears, and we don't necessarily recognize what a big deal it is for the other person.
Dr. Dobson: What are they?
Shaunti Feldhahn: For men, and this is about 70 to 75% of men, it's not 100%, but for most men, it's this deep like question, "Am I going to be able to provide for the family?"
Dr. Dobson: Yeah.
Shaunti Feldhahn: The way that a lot of men said, it's sort of just hovering in the back of my mind. That's always there.
Dr. Dobson: That's reasonable, isn't it?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Well-
Dr. Dobson: Because a man does have that responsibility if he has a Christian perspective.
Shaunti Feldhahn: But a lot of women don't understand what a, I guess the right word is burden or compulsion, what that is. It's always hanging out there. We just don't necessarily see it, and so we don't recognize that so much of what our husband does is designed to try to step back from that fear.
Dr. Dobson: You get a little older and you start thinking about retirement and what happens if we run out of money?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Dobson: That is a legitimate fear for many people.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Exactly. The analogy that we put it as, because we found that this was actually even more for this gut level stuff that we're talking about, it's even more emotional than it is logical. Because like the fear of running out of money in retirement, that's a very logical dollars and cents kind of thing. Like, okay, that makes sense. But for guys, it's much more emotional under the surface even than that. It's almost like the fear that you have when you're standing on the edge of a cliff and you have a fear of heights. It's totally irrational, but it sort of feels like you're going to be pulled over the edge.
Dr. Dobson: Did the men you talked to bring that out?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah.
Dr. Dobson: Did they articulate that?
Shaunti Feldhahn: Yeah, totally.
Dr. Dobson: So they knew that this is a source of anxiety for them.
Shaunti Feldhahn: The way that several of the men put it is, "I'm always trying to back away from the edge of the cliff, so I'll just work tons of extra hours so that my boss sees me being a good soldier and I'm not on anybody's question mark list." The problem with that ... which is totally understandable. That's just one example. But if he's working away from the family, by definition he's not seeing his wife, he's not seeing his kids.
That tends to trigger what is more of a woman's cliff fear, which she's always feeling like she's being pulled towards that edge of, are we okay? I mean, women are just as likely to be worried about money as men. There's no gender difference there. It's about 50-50, men and women are spenders-savers for example. Women are just as likely to worry about the mortgage getting paid or whatever.
Dr. Dobson: Let me guess.
Shaunti Feldhahn: What?
Dr. Dobson: The women are more concerned about the children, whether they're going to be able to send them to college, whether they can put clothes on their backs at the beginning of the school year and things of that nature.
Shaunti Feldhahn: And whether or not everybody's happy, and whether or not we're close as a family. When he's walking around with this scowl on his face, worrying about money ... Like I was talking to the wife of one police officer in the grocery store, and she was like, "He's working all the overtime hours that he possibly can right now to try to build up a little bit of an extra reserve, and so we never see him." They had a little boy. "He doesn't see his dad."
The answer in her mind to the question, are we okay, is like, "No!" She tries to stay away from her cliff, her fear, by, "Honey, let's spend some time together. Let's go get dinner at the deli near the police station so that Bobby can see you and spend time with his dad." That might sort of seem fine to her, but for him, here's what happens. That's spending money. That pulls him closer to the edge of his cliff, and so he feels a need to work even more hours, and it becomes this vicious cycle.
What we found in general is that our efforts to try to make our fears go away, they tend to make our spouse's fears worse, and we don't know it's happening. Sort of the solution, the answer is to really recognize: your fears really are real.
I don't understand it, but Jeff really, truly has this burden. "Am I going to be able to provide for the family? I feel like I'm not enough to keep the family from falling." That's a real burden. I'm like, "What? Of course, you're enough. Why would you even think that?"
Then on his side, he needs to understand that for me, I truly worry when we're going in all different directions and the kids haven't seen us and we're not spending time as a family, I truly worry, are we okay? Like the kids are going to go off to college someday and they're not going to want to come back. You know? And now is the time to try to build that relationship. He's like, "Of course, they're going to want to come back. What do you mean?"
There's all sorts of things that trigger the fears in us, but this time that we're living through is definitely triggering this in a lot of people, and it will continue to because I don't feel like, at least now as we're sitting here recording this, I don't feel like that economic uncertainty is going to go away quickly.
Dr. Dobson: Not likely.
Shaunti Feldhahn: I think it's likely to be hanging out with us for quite some time. For the guy, that's always likely to be hanging over his head for a while of not just am I going to be able to provide, but now there's something that makes me think, "Oh my goodness, even more so. I need to be even more diligent." That's even more likely to cause that intensity, and worry, and stress that can trigger her concern about, "Are we okay as a family?"
Dr. Dobson: We've covered two of the sources of stress between men and women, and we're out of time. Let's deal with the other three and the solutions for it, suggestions that you have, in the next program.
Shaunti Feldhahn: Great.
Dr. Dobson: Shaunti, it's always good to have you here. This an interesting subject. the title of the book is Thriving in Love and Money, and written by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn. He's not here to defend himself today, but he had a role to play in this, didn't he?
Shaunti Feldhahn: He was a huge part of the research, yeah, and the writing.
Dr. Dobson: The subtitle is Five Game-Changing Insights About Your Relationship, Your Money, and Yourself. That is going to be the subject of the next program, and we'll do it right now and let people hear tomorrow what we're going to say. Thank you for being with us.
Shaunti Feldhahn: I really love being with you. Thank you.
Dr. Dobson: We'll do it again.
Roger Marsh: An enlightening conversation about the importance of husbands and wives being on the same page with regards to money. Dr. Dobson's guest today here on Family Talk has been Shaunti Feldhahn, discussing her new book, Thriving In Love and Money. For additional information on any of our guests this month, by the way, go to the broadcast page on drjamesdobson.org. Thanks so much for listening, and be sure to join us again tomorrow for another edition of 2020's Best of Broadcast.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.